Fall with Me (Playing for Keeps, #4)

by Becka Mack

“What are we—ah! Jesus Christ, Riley, Halloween was three months ago. Stop trying to scare the kids.”

Jaxon Riley is . . . okay. He turned the heating up two degrees to 72 without me asking, because I was walking around wrapped in a blanket. I made an offhand remark about the single shelf in the shower not being big enough for all my products, and even though he said maybe that’s a sign to use fewer products, when I came home from lunch with the girls, there were brand-new floor-to-ceiling shelves in one corner of the shower. A step stool magically appeared in the pantry a day after he walked into the kitchen to see me scaling the counters so I could reach the mugs on the top shelf, and even though he explicitly said Mittens wasn’t allowed to sleep with me, when my emotions got the best of me one night, the door creaked open, Mittens was tossed inside, and then the door was promptly shut again.

“I’ve not ever been a partner,” I bite out. “I’ve been the pretty trophy on your arm. The story you tell to make you look like a family man. I’ve played every damn part you asked me to play to make you look good to people whose opinions shouldn’t matter, and somewhere along the way I forgot who I was, who I was supposed to be. So excuse me for chasing romance on paper when real life showed me none. Excuse me for escaping to a fantasy world where the idea that someone might love me so wholly, so obsessively, isn’t far-fetched.”

I want to remember the way Ryne treated me, and I want to remind myself, day in and day out, that I deserve so much damn better than anything he ever gave me. That I’m not going to stand for anything less.